“Inet is the service which controls who can connect to your
computer and which services they can use. It allows you to set up
your telnet and ftp servers (as well as others), and gives you very
fine control over who can use which of these services. Inet is
a very important service with many uses. Unfortunately, it is often
the cause of security violations, and needs to be carefully
administered.”
“Inet is controlled by the inet daemon, or inetd. Inetd is
installed by default on most Linux systems, and is probably on
yours. To see if it’s currently running, you can issue the command
`ps ax | grep inetd`, which will search the running processes for
‘inetd’. If you don’t have it on your system, you can install it
from the net-kit RPM or from the rinetd Debian package.”
“Inetd reads it configuration from one file, which defaults to
/etc/inetd.conf. This file maintains all services that should be
run by inetd and how they should be run. It also bases who can use
which services by reading the files /etc/hosts.allow and
/etc/hosts.deny. Many other programs also use these two files for
access control.”